One of the round 2 themes in the WIS Championship is called “Six Drafts”. It’s a pretty cool theme where the 24 owners are divided into six groups of four and each group holds its own 4-person draft. Each group of four owners will play in a division together and is drafting from its own unique season. For example, the six seasons we used in that league were 1909, 1971, 1981, 1992, 1997 and 2009. The drafts run very quickly (3-4 rounds per day) and there’s enough talent for everybody to have a decent team. The best thing about the draft is that for each round after the first, the draft order is based on the reverse order of cumulative salary, so you have to weigh the benefit of taking the most expensive/best player with the advantage of drafting early the next round. Anyway, I have expanded this theme into a full-blown tournament. Here is how the tournament will be run.

Salary Cap: $100 Million

Round 1

There will be three leagues running simultaneously. That means there will be 18 different seasonal drafts (6 per league). If you are one of the first 18 to sign up, you should select the season that you want to draft from. Each season may be selected only once. Keep in mind that you will draft last in the first round. Once the 18 seasons are chosen, I will sort them in chronological order (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc.), then place them into leagues as follows..

League 1: A, D, G, J, M, P (A = NL East, P = AL West)

League 2: B, E, H,K, N, Q

League 3: C, F, I, L, O, R

Owners may sign up for up to three leagues, but can only select a year once. He must wait to see the final alignment before he selects his second and third choices, in order to make sure he is in different leagues. The draft order for round one (in all leagues), is the inverse order in which you signed up. The first 18 people to sign up must select a season. If you don’t want to pick last on the first round, then don’t be one of the first 18 people to sign up. For those who want to play in more than one league, you would simply sign up multiple times at different times. For example, I will probably play in 3 leagues. So, I will select season X for my first team. Then after all 18 seasons are selected, I might be the second or third person to sign up for season Y. Then maybe a wait a few days and become the fourth person to sign up for season Z, getting the top pick in that season.

Round 2

All 24 playoff teams will advance to round 2 where there will be another six drafts. The six World Series teams will be selecting the seasons in round 2. (Seasons selected in round 1 are blacklisted). The teams that played in the same league (i.e., AL/NL) will be part of that drafting group. For example, in League 1, if teams from season A and season J met in the World Series, then the four playoff teams from seasons A, D, G would be part of team A’s drafting group. And the four playoff teams from seasons J, M, P would be part of team J’s drafting group. Again, the person choosing the season will draft last in the first round. The rest of the first round draft order will be in inverse order of round 1’s playoff seeding (worst seed drafts first).

Prizes:

I have accumulated some $500+worth of credits, so I am funding the prize pool myself with WIS Credits. The World Series champ of round 2 wins $100. The runner-up gets $50.

Drafting Rules

The four people in each group will then draft their entire 25-man roster from their selected season (as well as their ballpark). The draft order for every round after the first will be based on cumulative salary spent (lowest salary drafts first). So for players who played with more than one team during the season, you will need to announce which version you are using in order to calculate the correct cumulative salary. For purposes of calculating a cumulative salary for draft order, all ballparks will be given an arbitrary salary of $4 million. Since it’s is assumed that anybody that wants to pick a ballpark early, must value the park highly. Obviously, this salary doesn’t count as part as your $100M team salary cap.

Owners should post their up-to-date cumulative salary after they make each pick, so it’s easy to calculate the next round’s draft order. I will not be actively running all 18 drafts. You should site-mail the person up next. The drafts won’t be on a timed schedule initially, but if a draft is running very slowly, I reserve the right to come in and set up a schedule to keep things moving (3 rounds per day).